1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a camera apparatus equipped with a function capable of outputting messages, and to a message outputting method. More specifically, the present invention is directed to such a camera apparatus capable of displaying multilingual messages in a foreign travel mode, and also to a multilingual message outputting method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, in electronic appliances equipped with display devices, while plural sorts of indication (representation) data made of different languages are prepared as indication data such as operation buttons displayed on operation screens of these display devices, any one of these indication data may be selected to be used as desirable indication data in response to selecting operations by users. In these conventional electronic appliances, these users may select desirable indications form, for instance, both Japanese indications (“KAISHI” and “SETTEI” expressed in Japanese) and English indications (“START” and “SET” expressed in English) to be displayed on the operation screen. On the other hand, cameras equipped with translation functions have been proposed. In such cameras, for example, when an English indication of “DANGER” is contained in a photographed image, this indication is character-recognized so as to be translated into a Japanese indication of “KIKEN”, and thus, this translated Japanese indication “KIKEN” is displayed on display units of the cameras equipped with the translation function.
However, even when the above-described conventional technical ideas would be employed in camera apparatus known as digital still cameras, for example, if users want to request a third party in an oversea travel place to take some pictures where the own users are photographed by using such digital cameras, then these users should request the third party to take these pictures on behalf of these users in a vocal manner. That is, the above-described digital cameras are equipped with CCD devices, while images of photographic subjects are photographed by a CCD and the like and these images are recorded as image data on various sorts of recording media, and furthermore, indications such as operation buttons displayed on operation screens could be expressed by using a plurality of languages. However, even when the users depart for foreign countries with using such digital cameras, these users must request any persons in the foreign countries to photograph pictures where the own users appear by these persons in the vocal manner. Furthermore, since various sorts of photograph modes have been prepared in recent digital cameras, the users of these digital cameras can hardly explain photographing methods adapted to the various photograph modes.